30 seconds!

There are lots of great scenes in Saving Private Ryan, but one of my favorites is at the very beginning, as the LSM is heading in towards the beach. The pilot yells "Thirty seconds! God be with ya!"

I like the "God be with ya!" because he's wishing them luck and protection. As the pilot, behind lots of armored plate, he's probably going to live. He feels protective of them but knows he can't protect them.

Soon enough the ramp goes down and you get a sense for what real war might be like.

I was lowering myself in the wheelchair lift the other day, and as I often do, I counted in my head how many seconds it took. Thirty. Hmm! Then the little ramp went down. I was glad there were no German soldiers in my back yard.

In this video it takes 31 seconds, because I was pressing the down button with the watch on my weak left arm. The weakness freed the button a couple of times and the lift made a grinding noise as it slowed down. The hairy, fleshy object is my knee.